Torture…an unnecessary post (part 1)

I haven’t blogged about the latest round of torture talk — not the question of prosecution (I vote yes, starting now, or better, yesterday); nor on truth commissions (yes); nor the fatuous “arguments” and deeply malign attempts to shift the terms of the debate that the GOP and its water-carriers have advanced; nor the CIA’s attempt — aided by lazy or evil media complicity to pre-empt the debate by asserting falsely (h/t Fallows) that Democrats as well as Republicans supported commiting war crimes/crimes against humanity; nor the fact that any claim to American moral exceptionalism is dead, drowned out by the screams of those tortured and murdered by American soldiers and intelligence officers, acting under orders issued by monsters in the highest places, desperate to conceal the lie at the heart of the war fought on false premises.

So many others are speaking on this across the blogosphere that it seemed unnecessary to say “me too” to posts like this, or this and dozens, really hundreds more. It is obvious that torture is wrong, a line that nations claiming legitimacy as well as interest do not cross. Isn’t it?

(That moral interests align with tactical goals in contemning torture as an exercise of state power will be the subject of part 2 of this post).

It is clear that murdering prisoners in custody is unacceptable, and that both those that commit such murders, and those who order and organize the practices that enable such murders are criminals, subject to investigation, trial and punishment on conviction. Isn’t it?

It is simply a measure of a society that wishes to be understood as civilized that those who advocate, order, facilitate, encourage and/or commit acts that would make an inquisitor vomit are shunned (to invoke the memory of that terrifying religious sanction) by all those who count themselves morally responsible men and women. Isn’t it?

And yet John Yoo opines. Jay Bybee adjudicates. Dick Cheney waits for make-up. George Bush, the embodiment of an unindicted — no, make that unconscious — co-conspirator, putters about his fine house in a high-rent district of Dallas.

More than a year ago I wrote of my despair at the thought of telling my son that his country tortured. Tonight, after watching story after story percolate out of the Bush-Cheney swamp to confirm that the American torture regime was worse than I ever dreamed (those 98 –and likely more — killed in custody; a “ticking time bomb” waterboarded 183 times, in a test-to-destruction exercise that ended with a broken mind and one more datum for the torturers bible; a POW (are you listening, John McCain?) hammered to extract a false confession to support an American president’s false justification for war), I find myself wondering how I can tell my son, just turned nine, that America allows the people who committed this crime and dishonored all Americans — him, me, my wife, my goddam cat, evernyone of us — to walk in the sun, to wallow in privilege, to speak and to be listened to as if they were serious, responsible men.

We have been led by thugs enabled by weak and cowardly followers for too long. We’ve forgotten what civil societies do; Bush and Cheney and Yoo and all the others have not been indicted. They are, to date, innocent as far as the law extends; and we do indeed live under the Catch 22 that the rule of law is something we need desperately to uphold in the wake of these same men’s evisceration of the idea. But there is no restriction under law to keep us from shaming those who have so deeply shamed their country.

This is why, in the end, Pelosi’s troubles may serve us all well. She has called for an investigation — of the claims on what she knew when and everything else to do with the making of America’s torture empire. Let’s bring it on….after all, if they’re innocent, they have nothing to fear, right?

Thank you for speaking out again. I’ve been blogging and writing about this issue for more than five years, ever since I read an account in 2004 of U.S. soldiers abusing the children of detained captives in order to elicit information.
We need to drain this swamp once and for all. Simply moving on, as we did after Watergate and Iran-Contra, will ensure that we wind up mired in it again at some later time. And one of these days, we may not be able to pull ourselves out!